Page 41 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

“I am not certain marriage is something I have ever considered as a possibility for myself. Particularly.”

She turned to look at him then, not sharply. Simply curious.

“I am aware that sounds peculiar,” he said, looking at the old pear tree, at the square of London sky above the garden wall. “My father’s line,” he continued, eventually. “He was not a goodman. Or a good father. For that reason, I have thought it best for his line to end with me.”

The silence that followed was very quiet, and he was shocked at his honesty with her.

“Why?” she asked, not pressing, only attending, as though the answer mattered and she had no intention of taking any other answer in its place.

He became aware, somewhere in the middle of the following moment, that he had said more than he had intended. He could not help himself. She had a way of asking things plainly, without architecture, and he found himself answering with a similar plainness before he had decided to. She was remarkable, unlike the other women he had allowed himself dalliances with.

“Rachel has mentioned,” she said, carefully, “that your father was not easy.” She was looking at her hands now. “She said it once, not a great deal, and I did not want to press her.”

“Rachel was kept away from him,” Frederick said. “For a long time. Deliberately.” A pause. “She knows little about him, and that’s for the best.”

Anna was very still. “What does that mean?” she asked quietly.

He hesitated; he had already said so much more than he said to most people, by considerable margin, and was aware of it. Andyet, her very existence pulled at his tongue in ways he had never imagined.

“Frederick.” Her voice was very quiet. She did not use his name often, and every time she did, it arrived differently than expected. “Did he… hurt you?”

He did not answer. He did not look at her. He was aware, in the silence that expanded between them, that this was itself an answer.

“I am sorry,” she said.

“He has been dead,” Frederick said, “for six years. That is that. It went with him, whatever he did to my mother, to…”

“That doesn’t mean it was nothing,” she said. “It only means it is over.” Her voice was not pitying. He could not have borne pity. It was something else, quieter, more serious, and kind. “I am sorry that you had to carry it,” she said. “And that you still do. You bear so much, and yet you still remain so strong…”

“I get the feeling that you are no stranger to remaining strong in the loss of parents, or what you may have hoped they would be.”

“I suppose you are right. I have mourned my father’s loss my whole life, carrying it with me like a birthmark. I think that is the hardest part…”

“What is?”

“That he was so smart, so kind, so vivacious. If he had been a lesser man, it would not sting as much. My mother, while a good woman, was never the same after he passed. I think I lost her then too, even though she has only been gone two years now.”

“I am sorry for that,” he paused for a moment. “I often think of what my mother could have been, if not for my father.”

He looked at her then. The London sky had shifted its clouds, and several more stars had appeared in the gap above the pear tree, and she was sitting in the dark in her shawl, looking at him with an expression that was not careful or composed.

It was simplypresent.

As if she had heard him and was staying anyway.

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” she said with a small smile.

“The gratitude is mutual.”

Percy stepped off the third step, crossed the two feet of paving between himself and Anna’s ankle, and sat down beside her. Not against her. Anna looked down at him and then back up at Frederick. The distance between them had somehow grown smaller the more they spoke, though he couldn’t remember either of them moving.

She was looking at him, and he was looking at her. The thing that had been accumulating in all the ordinary spaces between them, all the meals and hallway encounters and cold gardens, was very close to the surface.

He was the one who moved. He rose from the step, and it was not graceful for someone who had been fencing his whole life.

“It is growing cold,” he said, then cleared his throat. “You ought to go inside.”

She did not argue, her hazel eyes glowing in the looming moonlight. She looked at him for one moment more, with an expression he was not going to be able to stop thinking about, perhaps for the rest of his life. Then, she gathered her shawl, stood, and went up the steps and across the terrace and in through the door.